Creating a WordPress Blog Will Help Grow Your Online Business

Creating a WordPress blog can seem daunting when you contemplate doing it off of the official WordPress site where you simply point and click your way through the options until it’s published. There are technical installation steps to intimidate you, aesthetic issues to consider, search engine optimization strategies to address and content creation to intimidate you right out of having the blog you’ve always wanted.

Once you get past your fears and find a good set of tutorials, you’ll have the confidence it requires to create a WordPress blog with ease. The first time you do it, go slow and make sure you implement all of the steps.

As you become accustomed to the blog navigation on the dashboard, you’ll be tweaking it to your own preferences without hesitation. Before you install WordPress on your domain, consider why you’re choosing a blog format over that of a static HTML site.

Some people theorize that Google has a deep affinity for bloggers because of the social elements they provide paired with regular updates. Others simply say a blog is more optimized for search engine spiders, whereas a static site sometimes gets outdated and stale.

Creating A WordPress Blog Is A Good Business Move…

Creating a WordPress blog is a good business move for entrepreneurs whose business is online (or even an offline entity that needs an online web presence). Virtually any business model can be supported through the use of a WordPress blog, including affiliate marketing, info product sales, tangible promotions, services, and more!

When you go through this process, you’ll need to take it in stages, breaking it down into specific steps along the way. For instance, you’ll be registering a domain, getting hosting, installing WordPress, and then customizing the site to suit your business needs.

As you work more with WordPress, you’ll find that sometimes you have some tough choices to make. The wonderful thing about these sites is you have the ability to quickly switch things around, tweaking them for your personal preferences or so that the blog performs better in the search engines for you.

By creating a WordPress blog, you’re setting up a home for your brand on the net. Don’t think that the entire setup has to be done in a day. You can make a blog go live as you customize it and allow your visitors to see the changes along the way.

Don’t expect a sudden flood of traffic once you are done creating a wordpress blog. While Google may index it quickly, your content and SEO care-taking strategies are what will pull in a target audience who’s ready to listen to what you have to say.

WordPress is so much more than a blog. Many of you probably know about WordPress.com and the ability to create fast free blogs. You may even realize that you can self host WordPress by uploading the program to your own server space. But the fact is, WordPress is fast becoming the most used website building platform used for all websites being built today. There are so many reasons this is true but let’s look at seven of them.

Easy to Use — WordPress is easy for the lay person to learn and use to build very good websites within hours. One can find a template or “theme” in WordPress parlance, and then simply edit that theme to fit your needs without ever knowing any HTML or CSS. Once you learn how to customize a theme anything is possible.

Search Engine Optimization — Otherwise known as SEO, search engine optimization is almost automatic within each theme that you use with WordPress. You can also get fabulous additional “plugins” that will make your SEO even better, without knowing a single line of code.

Great Support — Due to the fact that WordPress is an Open Source software there is a very active and helpful community. This means there are also a lot of people that can be hired to help you with your WordPress website if you don’t want to build it yourself. But, even if you do want to do it yourself there are also many people you can ask for help.

Awesome Add-on’s — WordPress has little add-on’s called extensions. These are also known as plugins. Plugins can be easily installed within just a few clicks on your WordPress website. They will give your site more functionality, such as adding on a shopping cart, affiliate program, or something smaller such as featured posts. Adding such fun items as fun commenting functions, polls, ratings, social media icons and more to your website becomes possible with just a few straight forward clicks.

Content is King — WordPress is much more than a blog, it is in fact, an entire content management system. We’ve all heard the phrase “Content is King” and this is true. WordPress allows the content to be the main part of your Website in focus. You can easily update content on any page of your site very simply without knowing any code at all. No need to ask your webmaster to do it.

Customizable — There are many Themes which provide the look and feel of your WordPress Website, but even the themes are very customizable if you learn to use CSS and HTML. Even if you don’t know how to use these things you can quickly learn due to all the tutorials available and all the help available within the active community on how to customize any theme. You can even have specialized themes made relatively inexpensively compared to old style Web Designer costs.

No Hostages Taken — You will not be held hostage by your website designer for every last thing that you want done to your site. Once the site is designed and built you can easily change things on your own. You can even find someone else entirely, like a Virtual Assistant who specializes in WordPress updates, to perform tasks on your WordPress site less expensively than a designer.

Using WordPress as the program of choice has many benefits to it, the benefits above are just but a few. Once you get started using WordPress to create your business website you’ll soon discover the ease in which you can design, build and maintain your business website with ease.

Affiliate marketing is very enticing because it doesn’t require that you create your own products – you’re simply profiting off the creations of others. But it’s not automatic money, either. You do have some work to do to generate traffic and sales.

The first thing you want to do is register a domain in your niche with keywords anchoring the domain for relevancy. You might not be in the “make money” niche – you might choose to promote fitness products, for example.

Once you get a domain and have reliable hosting, install the WordPress blog onto your domain using Fantastico De Luxe or the long installation method if you’re more tech savvy.

You want to get all of the settings in place before you begin adding content, such as the permalinks so that each post has a URL that’s search engine optimized. If you have custom graphics or a premium theme, install them prior to content creation as well.

Google might be knocking on your blog door quickly or it may take awhile to find your blog, but you want to have some sort of content for them to crawl and index as soon as possible.

Before you begin affiliate marketing, you need to keep in mind that your blog is going to act as a beacon for visitors in your niche. Those people will be relying on your recommendations, so it’s best if you truly identify the products that can fill their needs.

You can promote a variety of tangible and digital products depending on your niche market. You need to get signed up with the affiliate programs at ClickBank, PayDotCom, Share-a-Sale, Commission Junction, and Amazon to name a few.

Start making a list of items you want to promote. Your blog will review and recommend certain products, so you’ll want to explain what the product is, why it’s a good investment, and how it compares to its competition.

The more personality you breathe into your blog, the better it will convert. A cold blog where the visitors don’t get to know the author doesn’t build trust with a target audience. You can sometimes get complimentary review products from digital product creators, if you indicate that you’ll be reviewing it. But if not, make sure you buy a copy or item so that your reviews are real and unbiased.

A good balance of pros and cons is crucial to the authenticity of your blog. If everything’s always rainbows and unicorns and you never find anything wrong with a product, then it will sound off alarm bells to your visitors, who will know you’re just in it for a quick buck.

Place banner graphics and text links in your sidebar and rotate them, while keeping an eye on conversion statistics. Have a banner that’s horizontal placed beneath your header. And whenever you write a new blog post, make sure you hyperlink to the affiliate product using your affiliate URL.

How to Install WordPress

In order to start your new wordpress site, you’ll need to first have a domain name and hosting account and learn How To Install WordPress. Some people simply register a WordPress site on WordPress.com but the problem with that is that you’re then at the mercy of other people.

You don’t want to wake up one day and see that your hard work has been deleted by an overzealous moderator of some sort. So host your WordPress site on your own domain where you have total control.

There are to ways How To Install WordPress. One requires a lot more technical effort on your part, but is more secure. The other is quick and easy, but some say has vulnerabilities attached to it.

Fantastico is an automated WordPress installation feature usually included in your hosting account if you have cpanel. HostGator is one such company that offers it. It will install the blog for you once you enter a few details to register it.

But while it’s an easy install option, some people warn of its ability to be hacked by unethical spammers. Still, for newbies it’s a wonderful way to get started so we’ll cover that first.

How To Install WordPress With Cpanel

Log into your cpanel and click on Fantastico De Luxe under the Software and Services section – it will look like a smiley face icon. Under Blogs, click the WordPress option and choose “New Installation.”

Choose the domain you wish to install WordPress on from the drop down menu and if it asks you for the directory, leave it blank if you wish it to be on the root of the domain or put “blog” without quotes if you want it located at domain.com/blog.

Grant yourself admin access with a username and password and Click Install WordPress and Finish Installation. Make sure you bookmark the login page so that you’ll know where to go whenever you want to manage or post to your blog!

How To Install WordPress Manually

Manually, the install steps for WordPress are a bit trickier. You’ll go to WordPress.org and download the software yourself. Unzip the file and follow the How To Install WordPress instructions on their site verbatim.

You’ll be renaming files, integrating it into your domain, and running the install scripts. It’s best if you have an FTP client available for this so that the process goes smoother for you.

I highly recommend when learning How To Install WordPress you use a WordPress Hosting company with One Click WordPress Installation.

Dominate Your Competition by using these WordPress SEO Tips

Many online entrepreneurs develop a blog presence online because they’ve heard about the search engine appetite for blog content. And it’s true – Google and other search platforms like frequent content often provided by blog entities.

But creating a blog isn’t enough to help you rank high for your niche market. You want to know some solid, evergreen WordPress SEO tips that will help position you ahead of your competitors for traffic in your niche.

Let’s start by talking about theme design. The way your theme is created has a lot to do with how the search engine navigates it and ultimately indexes it. Before investing in a theme, make sure that it’s search engine optimized. At the end of this WordPress SEO Tips article you will find a link that will take you to the Best of WordPress where you can find the Best WordPress Themes to use.

Some of the work you’ll need to do yourself, like ensuring your post and page titles, as well as the bulk of the content, utilizes your niche keywords. You can even use a free keyword tool and download a list of the high volume or long tail keyword phrases to use in each post.

Using keywords in your content isn’t quite enough. You have to use them as tags for the post also. And then you need to categorize the post so that Google (and your visitors) can easily sort out the topics.

There are some other tweaks you can make on your blog to help it be search engine optimized. First, make sure that you set your permalinks for optimal performance. Log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings and then Permalinks.

It defaults to show your blog URLs with non optimized numbers like this: domain.com/?p=123 – but that URL doesn’t tell Google what’s on that page. Instead, choose the last option that says custom structure and type this into the space provided: /%postname%/ so that it makes your URL look like this: domain.com/keyword-phrase-here.

Aside from these WordPress SEO Tips, you can also install some neat SEO-based plug-ins to operate on your blog. Include a sitemap for Google so that navigation is clear for the search engine spiders that visit.

Also install the WordPress SEO plugin by yoast, it helps your blog achieve the maximum ranking it can from being perfectly optimized for your relevant keyword phrases. By doing these small steps, and posting regularly, your blog will continue to rise in the ranks of the search engine results pages (SERPs).